We Created Chávez Quotes

“Alongside the general fetishism of the state that manifests in the Venezuelan context as a fetishization of Chavez the man, there stands as well an equal and opposite fetish of what has been called “horizontalism,” the fetish of refusing or ignoring the state a priori as in Holloway’s insistence that ‘the world cannot be changed through the state.” To fetishize means to worship something human as though it were divine, and I hope that the literal fetishism of both positions is clear: the first refuses to see the state (and Chavez) as produced by human hands and therefore subject to radical transformation; the second—in its denial of human organizational capacities, of organic leadership through struggle. and of the delegation of power—sees such transformation as utterly impossible and futile. For both, in other words, the state is a superhuman entity to be either worshipped or feared but never transformed.”
― George Ciccariello-Maher, We Created Chávez: A People’s History of the Venezuelan Revolution